Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

Being a top AdSense expert, I inevitably get many emails from publishers who have gotten their AdSense account suspended and then I get the sob story about how they won’t be able to pay their mortgage, they will have to let all their employees, etc etc. Trust me, I have heard it all! But regardless of their AdSense account being suspended, the real reason of their immediate money issues is the fact that they had all their eggs in one basket… in this case the AdSense basket. The same can go for someone who is working one killer affiliate program that suddenly ceases to exist one day, and is left with no viable alternative option to slip into the deceased affiliate program’s place.

The same applies for those that have their one killer website… their pride and joy, but unfortunately the one that brings in 95% of all their income. If you are old school SEO enough, you will remember that many people found themselves in this position when the now-infamous Florida update hit in November 16th, 2003. When Google updated their algorithm (which wasn’t done in a continuous style back then like it is now) that day, the forums lit up with people whose websites literally stopped getting any Google traffic overnight. And with the huge Google share even back then meant that people who were living the good life with their Google rankings suddenly found themselves scrambling in panic-mode to not only restore their rankings but to also restore the sudden loss of income, whether AdSense, affiliate income, or other.

So if you are one of those who has most of your eggs precariously balanced in a single basket, here is what you can do to diversify a bit so that you won’t have to go into panic-mode when disaster strikes your bottom line, and why you should do it. Keep reading…

Talk about 404 pages has suddenly hit the blogs over the past day because of the new way that the Google beta toolbar is handling 404 errors. Now, instead of showing a default server 404 erorr page, Google will instead show a few different options to try and find the site, whether it is heading up to the home page or searching in Google for the site. But, if you have a custom 404 error page (one that is longer than 512 bytes, which would generally cover most site’s custom 404 ages) Google will still display your custom 404 page.

Which brings up what many webmasters have been pondering… what exactly should go on a custom 404 page? Here are eleven things that should go on your custom 404 page.
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Not all of us have hit the household status we all wish our company names had. So if you aren’t a Sony or a WalMart, have you ever considered the fact that someone might be trying to find your company or product and either spelling it wrong or searching for a slight variation because the person who recommended you pronounced it incorrectly? And even the best SEO can’t rank your site number one for every single variation of your company name or brand. The last thing you want to do is lose those potential customers to competitors, when they were trying to find your site in the first place.

If you are lucky, Google might direct some of those misspellings to your site via their “Did you mean: ____” hint that it shows above the results when they believe there is a good chance that someone made a typo. But you have to be pretty well known to have Google do that for all your potential misspellings and typos of your company name. Keep reading…

Sometimes I click on a Google ad when searching for something and run into a perfect example of a landing page that offers zero chance of converting, no matter how you slice or dice it. Usually it is an attrocious design or some sort of coding error that causes those 0% conversion landing pages to show up. Then you get the really, really bad 0% landing pages, the ones that not only won’t convert, but that also send those first-time visitors hitting the back button as quickly as humanly possible… because…. wait for it… the landing page is one that is threatening to report first-time visitors to the authorities with possible legal action being taken. The reason? The site is flagging completely legitimate clicks as fraudulent ones, and sending them off to a special landing page threatening legal action. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to shake the webmaster and say “What on earth were you thinking???”

Here is a perfect example of one of those landing pages (click for full-sized):

My friend sent this to me, wondering what she possibly could have done to get this kind of message accusing her of fraud after simply clicking a Google ad… because while those in the industry know what this means, Joe Surfer does not know what an “IP address” or what “fraudulent click activity” is, and instead focus on the part “reported to the proper authorities” and “legal action may be taken”. So of course, I think maybe there was a slow response and she inadvertantly double or triple clicked the ad. And since I am moving soon, I tried the same search: Victoria movers and clicked on the moveit.ca advertisement (that link is to the site’s homepage not a click through the ad), which happened to be the first on the list, sitting above the organic listings, being careful to only click it a single time. And sure enough, I was greeted with the same warning threatening me with legal action. Now, I have a static IP, and have had the same IP for eons. I have never searched for Victoria movers and have never seen the site before, yet I got this same warning message. The URL seems to automatically forward from http://www.moveit.ca/?cd=gle to http://www.moveit.ca/security.htm

Now, any click fraud detection system that is set to ship new users visiting a site for the first time off to a click fraud warning page is definitely flawed. I am on a fairly common Canadian ISP, so it is not an issue with multiple people from an obscure ISP possibly hitting the page multiple times. And with a static IP address, there shouldn’t be any issue with that tripping any click fraud detectors.

There are definitely lessons to be learned, especially for those pay per click advertisers who are concerned about click fraud and are using an automated solution to deal with it that might be too powerful or too outdated, either of which could be the problem in this case.

First, never send your pay per click traffic to a webpage threatening legal action unless you are 110% sure that person you are sending is truly engaged in click fraud, such as isolating a competitor’s IP address that seems to hit your site 5 times every morning at 9am and sending that one person off to that landing page. But when you threaten innocent surfers, you will discover that your seemingly low conversion rates in your Google AdWords pay per click campaigns are not because your landing page sucks or you have a high number of invalid clicks, it is simply because you are sending them to a page that is threatening them! Trust me, the vast majority of people really don’t like to be threatened, especially when they are in the role of customer! There are too many competitors out there vying for that customer to lose them this way. Remove the warning page and your conversions will go up since you won’t be alienating so many visitors from the very first page view. I can only imagine the stats for the number people who have landed on that threatening landing page in error.

Second, you are paying for the traffic through AdWords regardless of what landing page you send the visitor to… so you might as well send them to a page that has a chance of converting into a customer (which it likely would have done so with my friend) rather than having those people click the back button as quickly as they possibly can for the fear of having the authorities showing up!

Third, make sure if you use click fraud detection software that it isn’t wrongly flagging legitimate clicks. And likewise, ensure that your pay per click expert who is handing your campaigns actually knows what he/she is doing and is not sending people off to that threatening landing page in error (like is definitely the case in this instance!). When your click fraud detection software isn’t correctly identifying what is possibly invalid click activity, it will make applying for credits with Google, Yahoo & MSN much more difficult since there are so many legitimate clicks mixed in. In this case, I am guessing someone handling the detection software went and added a major Canadian ISP to the filter, and effectively blocked a huge % of Canadian web surfers, including a very high percentage of those who would be doing a search for “Victoria movers”.

Fourth, this could definitely cause issues with Google AdWords and the terms of service when you are not only sending visitors to an incorrect landing page, but also threatening those legitimate visitors with legal action. Not to mention the nasty things it can do to your quality score if the click fraud detection software sends the AdWords bot off to that threatening landing page too!

And fifth, remember that everything you present to a visitor makes an impression and doing something like this makes a big one, and not neccessarily the kind of impression most business want to make! As a result, my friend will not use MoveIt.ca to find a moving company, and neither will I. And I am open to suggestions for a good moving company in Victoria

Anyone else run across any AdWords/YSM/AdCenter ads that you know have zero chance of converting? Some of my favorite ads are the ones that were clearly done by people training others on creating AdWords ad, with “example” or “sample” used as the title and in the text, but with the company’s URL used because you know someone forgot to turn off the campaign after training was over

Every so often, someone comes up with the idea that Google should offer a service that would allow webmasters to pay a fee to get specific information on ranking issues on a website, primarily for those sites that the owners feel should be ranking much better than it actually is. Because oftentimes, webmasters – particularly the “mom and pop” do it yourselfers who are not as in-tune to the latest algo changes and ranking updates – are at a loss for why their site can’t be found in Google or why they rank so far below their competitors.

While many webmasters would love to see this kind of service, the reality is that Google would never do this, at least not in my opinion. And here’s why

1. Catering to those with money. Not all webmasters would have the money to pay for the service. And suddenly Google is helping only those who can afford to pay, and too bad for those who can’t. And you know someone will raise the argument that it is the spammers who can most afford to pay Google for this kind of service

2. SEOs would be upset. Why? While they could utilize the service themselves, this would also mean that many of those people who might employ an SEO for ranking issues suddenly they wouldn’t have to since they could simply pay Google to tell them how to fix it themselves. End result, fewer businesses hiring SEOs for help, since now they can just pay Google to get that same info straight from the horse’s mouth.

3. Influencing the search rankings. Google could be accused of their organic listings suddenly being tainted by those who pay Google to help them rank better. And this certainly blurs the lines of the whole paid vs. unpaid listings in Google (although it certainly doesn’t stop Yahoo).

4. It’s just not very Google-y. Yes, they say they don’t do evil (although granted, some clearly disagree) but no matter how you slice or dice it, offering paid support to webmasters for their unpaid search listings is just a little bit on the evil side.

5. Google Webmaster Central. GWC has come a long way since the days it was originally a sitemaps tool. And fortunately for webmasters, they update it regularly adding new tools that webmasters can use to self-diagnose problems and issues Google could be having with their site. And there is no reason to believe that GWC has reached an end point for what they will make available to webmasters. However, perhaps some more documentation on not just how to use the tools, but why they are useful to site owners, would be good.

6. And there are, of course, those who would use it for evil, to see just how far various optimization techniques could be pushed and what exactly gets caught when an “innocent webmaster” pays for Google ranking support. And yes, we all know you would

So while a paid service offering help to webmasters would be nice, I just can’t see them doing it, at least not anytime in the near future. So webmasters will have to keep cornering Matt Cutts & the many other Googlers in an attempt to get personalized help for their sites at one of the industry conferences.

When planning and researching your keywords to target for either pay per click advertising campaigns or on-page keyword focus within your content, most marketers don’t realize they are leaving a lot of potential keyword options on the table. And what’s more, these alternative keywords are often less expensive to purchase or less competitive to target in the search results for. Why is this? Because too many people take what keywords the various keyword tools give them to heart. There is a huge wealth of traffic to be gleaned by targeting variations of your top chosen keywords.

So what exactly do these “variations” refer to? It definitely goes far beyond the typical misspellings, which is what most people think of when considering alternative keywords. And while misspellings are a crucial part of your keyword variations, there are more areas to look at. Here is what they are and how you can use them to your advantage when creating keyword lists.

Keep reading…

Whether you love it or hate it, link bait has been going strong for about a year now, with webmasters and bloggers carefully crafting titles and articles for the maximum amount of link baiting goodness. But like all SEO techniques that webmasters run wild with until it is done to death, is link bait due to be exterminated as a usable technique?

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While most people use dynamic keyword insertion in their Google AdWords campaigns for ease of use and customization when using large lists of keywords or to use for tracking purposes, most people don’t realize they can also use dynamic keyword insertion in their display URLs to increase clickthroughs as well.

First, let’s look at the display URL and how it works. This is the URL that AdWords displays when your ad shows up in the Google search results or when displaying on the search or content network. And as per AdWords requirements, this display URL must match the destination URL…. however, what most people don’t realize is that they don’t need to match exactly.
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Branding with pay per click ads is one of those hard things to track. When you are branding, you are not necessarily looking for clicks or conversions, although those can be seen as an added bonus. As a result, traditional methods of creating and tracking ad campaigns, as you would for regular keyword targeted campaigns, are thrown out the window when you are using pay per click strictly for the branding aspect.

With branding, it is all about getting your brand out there to be seen by as many eyeballs as possible… while paying the least amount possible. And if you are doing it correctly, your brand becomes known and easily recognizable within your market area, even if there is not the corresponding ad clicks to your site… something that tends to make some advertising execs very nervous. But in reality, it is not that much different from advertising through magazines where you have lots of eyeballs for branding potential, even if they don’t end up going to the URL listed in the ad.

Why brand with pay per click? First, if you do it correctly, you can get those eyeballs for a relatively cheap amount when you compare it to the pricing with regular keyword targeting. And if you have a recognizable logo – or one you want to be recognizable – you can also explore using image and video ads to compliment your branding campaign. But branding with pay per click, and particularly Google AdWords, is something that many pay per click advertisers overlook when considering their marketing efforts. However, following these steps will show how to easily start a branding campaign while spending the least amount possible on it.

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